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Friday, January 25, 2013

365 Poems: Flyover Country

Day 24

Hoosier morningPicture by Cathy Dee

In my continuing quest to discover poetry prompts, I found a site called 'We Write Poems' that has one on Thursdays. Yea! Just what I needed. Here was the prompt for today:Search your imagination and find something in your world that you see as beautiful…. but others might regard as ugly. Now write a poem about what your thoughts have uncovered.

How often do you hear the Midwest referred to as the 'Rust Belt'? I hate that name. It's ugly and untrue. So, I wrote this.

Flyover Country

Don’t look down: Thirty thousand feet belowlies a country you’d rather not see,full of people you’d rather not meet.You know: The places the pilot never announces. ‘Everyone, if you’re sittingon the right-hand side of the plane,you can see the endless cornfieldsin the highly agricultural and terribly flat state of Indiana.Soon we’ll be over the rust-belt capital of the Midwest, Chicago.Luckily, we won’t be stopping here on our way to sunny California,full of beautiful movie stars, rugged coastlines,and the geniuses of Silicon Valley.’Fly on, you right- and left-coasters,you American snobs. Leave to usthis midwestern motherland:The verdant checkerboard ofsweet corn and soybeansthat nurtures a nation and the world,the fields of dreams of the smart,hardworking men and womenwho drive the tractors and order theseeds and manage the landthat gives so much.Leave us our diaspora cities, divergentand diverse, busy, big-hearted, determined to succeedeven when their lifes’ blood industriesshutter and run. Leave us our great, sprawling lakes,our sinuous rivers, our hardwood canopy,glacial plains and moraine hills,our mercurial, tempestuous weather --Leave us -- all we Buckeyes, Hoosiers, Illini, Cheeseheadsand more, leave our big universities, our unexpectedculture, our music, our art, our museums andJust fly on: We turn our broad and brawnyshoulders away; we are busybuilding, breaking, rebuilding ...bragging, laughing, planningbare-headed and singing* --and, fellow passengers? Your captain suggests that on some trip soon, youlook out your windows,and see.

2 comments:

Thanks for sharing this Cathy. We do most of our traveling by car so we get to see all the nooks and crannies along the way. We discover small towns and even smaller clubs of houses and farms. You see the little kids, the old men, the farm animals and the dogs racing you down the country lane, barking until we're out of sight.